This is Robert L. Dear, the alleged mass shooter at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs yesterday. He is suspected of murdering officer Garrett Swasey of the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) Police Department. He also is suspected of shooting 12 people in total, killing Swasey and two others.

President Obama said this morning that the incident terrorized an entire community.

The last thing Americans should have to do, over the holidays or any day, is comfort the families of people killed by gun violence — people who woke up in the morning and bid their loved ones goodbye with no idea it would be for the last time.

And yet, two days after Thanksgiving, that’s what we are forced to do again.

We don’t yet know what this particular gunman’s so-called motive was for shooting twelve people, or for terrorizing an entire community, when he opened fire with an assault weapon and took hostages at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado. What we do know is that he killed a cop in the line of duty, along with two of the citizens that police officer was trying to protect. We know that law enforcement saved lives, as so many of them do every day, all across America. And we know that more Americans and their families had fear forced upon them.

This is not normal. We can’t let it become normal. If we truly care about this — if we’re going to offer up our thoughts and prayers again, for God knows how many times, with a truly clean conscience — then we have to do something about the easy accessibility of weapons of war on our streets to people who have no business wielding them. Period. Enough is enough.

May God bless Officer Garrett Swasey and the Americans he tried to save — and may He grant the rest of us the courage to do the same thing.

Swasey was 44, a six-year veteran of the campus police department. He was assisting the Colorado Springs Police Department, the university said.

A subject armed with a rifle had entered the facility and opened fire on employees and patients before barricading himself inside. Officer Swasey was among the initial responders and was fatally shot at the scene along with two civilians. Three Colorado Springs Police Department officers, one El Paso County Sheriff’s Office deputy, and four civilians suffered gunshot wounds during the incident.

On the subject of domestic terrorism: The Colorado shootings occurred on “Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving and normally a day of great joy in the United States.

There’s no doubt, however, that hearts can turn to stone no matter the day. It was hard yesterday for me not to think about a Black Friday incident in 2010 in which families at a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony were the prospective targets.

Writing about this Black Friday incident in Portland eventually led to a bizarre situation in which a reader defending an MLM scheme accused me of being a lackey for Israel while the individual at once declared that Israel engineered the 9/11 attacks and that the former secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was a “suspect” in the attacks: